Welcome, Dear Reader, to my new series in which I chronicle my competitive, casual, and hobby exploits through The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Three. If you missed my series last year: Welcome! You can catch up on the year’s end post here. If you’re a returning reader: Also welcome – it’s good to have you back.

Before we get into the meat of this update though, let’s cover some of the basics of this series.

Who Am I?

I’m Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones, Goonhammer’s resident Chaos guy, Content Director, and co-founder of Goonhammer.com. I’ve been here since the beginning. I’m also the artist responsible for like 99% of the graphics on this site. No, I don’t have the time to draw an avatar for you and I’m not accepting commissions at this time.

What This Series is About

Because it’s a new year it’s fair to kick things off again with a new statement of purpose. When I started writing these back in 2021, the general idea was that I’d start playing competitive 40k and improve, documenting my progress along the way. That’s still generally the premise this year, though I’m going to be scaling back a bit on my competitive aspirations and focusing more on narrative play, at least for a bit. I’ll also be documenting the games I play, the hobby progress I make, the travel I do, and the friends I make along the way.

My Goals for 2023

In the beginning this series was mostly about my attempts to actually play a shitload of competitive Warhammer and improve at it. And 55+ articles and 200+ games later, I’ve mostly done that. But I’ve also plateaued – I’m now pretty comfortably at the place where I’ll go better than .500 at any event I play at, and going 3-0 on day 1 is fairly normal. But breaking past that – finishing 3-0 at my local RTTs or hitting the top 16 at a GW event – is still out of reach, for a few reasons:

• The biggest reason is that I’m not adapting quick enough to meta shifts and taking the armies that make things easier. I’m pretty much locked in to Chaos, and so my fortunes only take me as far as the Chaos armies I play are capable of doing. That’s not the only reason I’m not improving much any more, but it puts an upper bound on my success and makes things harder if I’m not willing to switch to Astra Militarum or another top-tier faction when they’re on top.
• Part of this is also that I paint to a specific standard because I’m usually going after best painted and/or best overall, and that limits my ability to pivot and take models I haven’t painted yet. Again, not a dealbreaker, but it doesn’t help.
• Past that, there are also elements of my game that are still pretty rough. I take too many chances and put myself in spots where bad dice can fuck me over. That’s not great. I also really struggle with how aggressive I should be – casual passive scoring gameplay does not suit me at all and figuring out when to strike and when to pull back is something I haven’t yet figured out.
• I could also stand to play more games – a lot more. I think that realistically in order to improve substantially at this point I’d need to double the number of games I play in a year, and do so with a sparring partner who can really help me get to the next level, both by being a good player, and by the two of us testing lots of different armies and playing different scenarios.

Simply put, I don’t have the time to do the things I need to do to improve. And that’s OK, but it means that I’m likely to be living that 4-2 life. I think winning an RTT could still happen this year, though, and that’s my general gaming goal. My plan right now is to attend each of the big GW events this year – Warhammerfest, the US Opens in KC, Tacoma, and Tampa, plus the Narrative Finale and the Goonhammer Open in Maryland. That’s a pretty big slate, but I’ve enjoyed the GW events significantly more than the others I’ve attended.

Hobby-wise my goals are pretty straightforward: Finish my Black Legion project (at least for now), and get my World Eaters army updated for the new book when it releases.

Hobby Progress

Let’s talk Hobby Progress. There are a few big things I’ve been working on, some of which I can talk about and some of which I can’t yet. The big thing I can talk about now is Boarding Actions, for which I’ve been working on the terrain. I already wrote about my gallowdark terrain for the How to Paint article on it, so check that out for more on the terrain.

Past that, I also had some additional homework to manage for the January RTT I was attending. After looking at the Arks of Omen changes and the new points, I eventually decided Death Guard were my strongest army option moving forward. They’re still slow and a bit predictable, but my hope is that with some transports and vehicle support I can get around that.

I had 6 models to paint for the army the day before the event: Two plague marines with cleaver, two with mace + axe, one with a flail, and one Blightlord with a blight launcher. I really only needed the first four, so I set out to paint them in a single day.

Start of the process

Midway

Finished, mostly

Ultimately I was only able to finish the four I really needed, getting them done by around 1am. The upside is that they look more than good enough to fit in with the rest of the army and be truly done, and it won’t take me long to finish the other two in the future. So I’ll come back to them at some point. My process for painting Death Guard is here.

The Games

I’ve been busy since the end of last year with two types of games: Some Boarding Actions test games for the review, and another RTT.

Boarding Actions

When we get a book to review it’s pretty important to the Goonhammer crew that we get some time to play with it before writing the review. Often there’s a lot about how an army or mission pack feels that can get lost if you just go by what’s written on the page, and one way we can make sure the reviews we write are the best out there is to sit down and get some games in. And that’s what I did with the Boarding Actions missions from Arks of Omens: Abaddon.

Who wants a piece

Cultists close the door on some enemy Blightlord Terminators

Death Guard take on the Sons of Ash in a Boarding Action game

Plague Marines and Possessed rumble

I played around half a dozen games of Arks, testing out a few different lists but mostly working with my Death Guard. On the whole it’s a fun way to play that I think would be perfect for beginners if they cleaned it up a bit and made it work with normal terrain.

The January 2023 Asgard RTT

Most of the RTTs I play at are at Asgard Games in Houston. I attended something like four RTTs there last year, and have won Best Painted at every event I’ve been at. I’ve also never finished better than 2-1 at one of them, usually slamming into one of the area’s best players in the finals in a round where I’ve had uncannily bad luck on the final mission over the last year or so.

Here’s the list I was running:

My list - click to expand

This is basically the same shit I was running two years ago, only with an extra unit of plague marines to support it and a pair of MBHs instead of bloat-drones. It can hit harder in melee thanks to the extra weapons, and has a ton of extra doodads on every unit, half of which I’ll forget because I never took them before. It has too many characters, but I wasn’t into making the hard choices this time around. Next time I’ll trim it down by removing the Blightbringer and Putrifier and I’ll probably spend the points on a drone.

Game 1: vs. Jon Brewer’s Adeptus Custodes

The Mission: Death and Zeal

Jon's List - click to expand

Jon’s relatively new to the game and running Custodes. Custodes don’t do particularly great into Death Guard even when played well, in part because paying extra points for a lot of 2-damage wargear isn’t amazing against an army with inherent -1 damage and high toughness isn’t amazing against the -1 and re-rolling 1s to wound. Plus that AP-1/AP-2 zone that Death Guard live in is perfect for coming after 2+/4++ models.

Jon doesn’t play a bad game but his list is pretty unoptimized and that makes the game pretty easy. I help him out where I can and prevent him from throwing Trajan away needlessly early but I coast through for the most part.

Result: 97-55, Win

Game 2: vs. Jon Newell’s Bloody Rose Adepta Sororitas

The Mission: Secure Missing Artefacts

Jon's list - click to expand

Jon’s running a Bloody Rose list and he’ll prove during the game that Sisters are just as capable of some bullshit scoring in Arks as they were in Nephilim. What I have going for me is that the list is pretty unoptimized (Paragon Warsuits just aren’t very good now), and also that Repentia are a lot less scary to Blightlords than they are to Scarab Occult Terminators. One “fun” trick Jon has is to bring a Dogmata who generates her own Miracle dice each round, then chuck that die for the faction secondary to score free VP.

Ultimately however Jon doesn’t have the melta firepower he needs to deal with me and I’m able to control the board pretty handily. I even get to live the dream at one point, charging a unit of Zephyrim and Celestine with the 10-model plaguemarine squad and using Haze of Corruption to cause damage to spill over. The two flails killed 8 Zephyrim by themselves while the cleavers took out the Geminae and Celestine. Good stuff!

Result: 95 – 71, Win

Game 3: vs. Erik Nelson’s Craftworlds Eldar

The Mission: Recover the Relics

Erik's list - click to expand

Erik’s a regular sparring partner of mine and the best player in the Astros Militarum. He’s running an Ulthwe list that can score points hilariously easily and he’s just come off a win against Carmine’s Astra Militarum the round before, fending off some spectacular bullshit. Neither of us has ever won an Asgard RTT and we both want it. Which is bad news for me, because everything about this situation favors Erik. Hell even the terrain here is bad – for some reason table 1 has the shit terrain for Asgard today, and it means we have bad, poorly defined ruins to work with.

The mission is a big tip in his favor – the longways deployment zone makes it near impossible for me to screen him out of the back of it for scoring Behind Enemy Lines, and screening back *and* front is also impossible. There’s also no center objective on this mission, making it very difficult for my Blightlords to stay relevant if he doesn’t want to engage with them. The Blightbringer can help here a little by giving them extra speed.

To top it off, Erik wins the roll-off to go first, which is something he wanted to do and I desperately needed on my end – Relics punishes the shit out of you for going second if you have no forward deploy, and this means a +2 CP swing in Erik’s favor, which sucks shit. He deploys aggressively with his striking scorpions, charges my DZ and basically stuffs me in there all game – I spend the whole game reacting to his units crashing my DZ and trying to dig my way out. Meanwhile his bike farseer moves in and out of the middle of the board with Quickening, maxing Warp Ritual early.

Now Erik will tell you that even in a winning situation things “feel” precarious for the Eldar player, but he’s pretty full of shit. He trivially controlled the board from the safety of cover with his d-cannons while never really threatening to run out of units to suicide into my DZ. I was able to stay in it thanks to the game being 6 objectives with hold 1/hold 2, but Erik blew me out on secondaries, where some real bad luck on my end meant missing grind on two rounds where Erik held onto a single exarch with a mix of fate dice and large numbers of 5+ invuln saves.

All that said, Erik is a good player and played a strong army and he deserved the win against a list that I think needs some more fine-tuning for Arks.

Result: 76-89, Loss

I win Best Painted but because the event was using clownshoes placings metrics with battle points instead of win paths, I drop to 4th place behind Carmine, who lost in round 2. I am so sick of events doing this kind of dumb shit but as long as BCP makes it the default setting it’s going to keep happening.

Thoughts on the List and Death Guard

A few less organized thoughts:

• Spread the Sickness is really, really good now. Feels like 11 free points and 15 is very achievable.
• I’m not sold on Blightlords. I like the free wargear, but a unit of 10 isn’t it. Maybe 2×5 or 3×5, even. The 4++ works, though.
• I need fewer characters. I’m going to cut the Putrifier and Blightbringer and potentially use the points for another vehicle, or more blightlords.
• The MBHs at 110 feel very good, but they’re still too high variance. I’m debating cutting them for a third PBC. The PBCs feel pretty good and if I had more I could have dug out the d-cannons from the ruin pretty well, I think.
• Despoiled Ground was a mixed bag. I think it’s scorable but I need to be better about playing for it in late rounds
• I didn’t get a chance to try Fleeing Vectors. Seems good but the right opponent didn’t come up.

Next Time: More Hobby Progress and Vadinax Games

Ok that wraps up my first post of the year. I’m pretty happy with it as a start, and looking forward to the next one where I’ll talk about some more of my hobby progress and the first games of the Vadinax campaign. If you haven’t seen Vadinax yet, check it out – we’re running a huge global campaign for Patrons and I’m excited to be kicking things off this weekend.

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.